Editor’s Note: This piece is an extension of my July 5 post about existential dread. If you’re not interested in my posts that skirt current events and politics, you should consider skipping this. Also, I wrote most of this before the assassination attempt on former President Trump or Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race.)
The writing bug bit me when I was in high school.
I started putting together weekly recaps of the CYO basketball league that I was helping out with on Saturday mornings for the community newspaper in Liverpool. My middle school years had ended and a few of us hung around the gym at St. Joseph’s The Worker to keep score, play pickup, and not get in trouble. It was fun; the kids in the league liked seeing their names in the paper, I got a creative outlet, and the league got some publicity. Win-win-win.
I eventually started writing for something called hj magazine, a weekly for teens/by teens insert in the evening newspaper (the Herald-Journal, thus hj). I got to develop a persona and my name would appear on stories in the paper next to the real god damn journalists. I’m not going to lie, it was pretty fucking cool1. It spurred me to pursue journalism as a career. I wanted to get paid to write for a living.
Things changed. I shifted to a career in sports PR, before turning to a career in corporate marketing, then nonprofit marketing communications, then corporate PR. Along the way, I have continued to freelance and for the past eight years have been a restaurant critic for Syracuse.com, the digital evolution of the now defunct Herald-Journal. Full circle, right? I get paid to write for my day job, tickle the creative itch with my freelance work, and write Dirt Nap because it’s good for my ego2.
I love journalism. Check that. I love good journalism. ProPublica investigations and interviews by
. Longform stories in Texas Monthly and Texas Tribune. Lawrence Wright and Dave Cullen are authors and historians, but their work is wholly journalistic. is one of the best writers you’ve never heard of. And so, so, so many more are out there.And it’s why, in this time in America, I feel a sense of loss.
Something happened recently that pushed me — a journalism defender and news junkie — over the line and turned me into one of those people who yell at their phones.
— a very entertaining Substacker — posted this narrative recently featuring The New York Times’ top editor claiming that defending democracy is a partisan act. Huh? For real. Here’s the quote:“To say that the threats [to] democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda.”
Kahn beliefs that threatening democracy is now a partisan issue — one side is pro-threatening and one side is anti-threatening — and denouncing those threats would be tantamount to siding with a candidate.
And for the first time, my trust in the non-Fox News media eroded. Yeah, some outlets have made mistakes and others have royally fucked up. But, the newspaper of record for the United States said it would not say something was x because it might elevate the position of y.
I was pissed. I’ve long ignored The Times’ op-ed pages, but this stance by the newsgathering operation got under my skin. So, I decided to save myself $28.48 a month:
I took a stand. I was proud of myself.
And then my former co-worker Mike chimed in and popped my balloon3. In my Instagram comments on this post, he wrote:
The really tragic part is that he’s describing the exact role they’ve played for the last eight years. They sold you pure propaganda for years, including what they were saying about Biden’s cognitive issues right up until they couldn’t be denied any longer.
You’re in shock because they’re acting like journalists on this very narrow topic. I’m sure they’ll carry plenty of water for Kamala or whoever the party chooses.
Is that really it? Was I lied to?
You’re in shock because they’re acting like journalists on this very narrow topic.
Is that what bothered me? And, are they really acting like journalists?
It got me thinking about what I was taught as a journalism student back in the day. Be accurate. Tell the truth. Be objective. By Mike’s definition, and surely Joe Kahn’s, the defense of democracy is taking a side. I disagree and so, presumably, does the Society of Professional Journalists in its code of ethics. For instance, these bullets:
Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable. Give voice to the voiceless.
Recognize a special obligation to serve as watchdogs over public affairs and government. Seek to ensure that the public’s business is conducted in the open, and that public records are open to all.
The New York Times, a publication that holds itself above reproach, higher than all others, and with such great esteem failed us who have remained loyal to the media.
There was extensive reporting in the spring that owner A.G. Sulzberger is angry with The White House because it refuses to give The Times a sit-down with the president. The result has been a more damning approach to President Joe Biden and his campaign that goes beyond the critical eye that should be paid to our leaders.
, once The Times’ public editor, found that in the week after the debate that the publication ran 192 stories related to Biden’s age. During that same week, which overlapped the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, there were 92 stories on former President Donald Trump.(Was the debate bad? No. It was fucking awful. I’m a Biden defender and I agree that he should have left the race. But, has Trump been equally as troublesome with his own cognitive recall and oratorical wanderings? Yep. And I’m not even talking about his performance in the debate.)
(SIDE NOTE: I’m not naïve enough to think there is not bias in the press. Journalists take their pledge to report the facts, but their ownership doesn’t. Corporations have a duty to their shareholders to make money. I can accept that. After all, if they don’t get paid, neither do I4.)
And it extends beyond The Times.
at has a really interesting post about how word choice influences what you see as a media consumer. He called it the Strawberry Fields Principle:In The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” John Lennon sings, “Nothing is real,” and that’s how Trump’s propaganda works: Overwhelm Americans with so many lies and contradictory doublethink that no one can say what’s true anymore, and without truth, democracy has little defense.
But why? Trump is chaos. Chaos sends people looking for information. There’s a need for content on TV and radio, and in print and digital sources. National networks and publications are in competition for a finite resource: us. Consumers of media. We are the traffic to websites that creates revenue through clicks. We subscribe(d) to The Times or The Washington Post and others. Our eyeballs watch MSNBCNNFOX, driving higher ratings and increased ad rates.
Is this is a cynical viewpoint? You’re god damn right it is. But, I invite you to please let me where I’m wrong.
We get the news we deserve and the news we pay for. Newspapers that rushed to build websites in the late 1990s and posted all of their content for free wound up shooting themselves in the ass when they went back to charge for it in the 2000s. Circulations have fallen sharply and consumers have gone with the “if it’s free, it’s for me” approach. As a result, revenues have fallen and newsrooms have shrunk. Why pay more to read a website when you can be spoon fed your ideas by Fox or MSNBC?
Where this hurts most is the local media. Democracy dies in darkness, and the news deserts across America are starving us from quality independent coverage of our communities. Those shrinking newsrooms? They hurt the most in places like Syracuse. Remember that newspaper I wrote for in high school? It’s surviving sister paper once had bureaus across the region with dedicated reporters to local government coverage, local school district reporting, and other community-level journalism. Today, there’s one person in Syracuse responsible for suburban government and school coverage.
We get the news we deserve and the news we pay for. And, these days, some of us have chosen to sit on the sidelines for the time being.
The brilliant
polled people about their media diet for a recent edition of his exceptional Substack called . I chimed in, as this post had been stewing in draft mode and my mind was already there:I get the calories I need to survive. I’m on a news diet, as opposed to the actual diet I should be on. My consumption is enough to sustain life as someone who is/was a news glutton. I read the local headlines for my work in media relations, ingest the top of the hour headlines from NPR and BBC once or twice a day, and glance at my push alerts. That’s it. Truly, it surprised my wife to learn how little I’m consuming lately because she was always the one quietly suffering because of my voluminous news intake.
I watched two hours of Rachel Maddow on MSNBC5 Monday night. It was the first time that I voluntarily tuned into an American cable news network6 for more than 15 minutes in…months?
So, what to do?
It’s incumbent on us to find the truth. View things skeptically. Seek answers to your questions. Find good sources of news, then trust and verify. Hear something on CNN that sounds fishy? Find out what the BBC is reporting. Read something in The Wall Street Journal that doesn’t sit right? See what CNBC or Bloomberg are saying. Subscribe to your local paper and *gasp* pay for the damn news.
The truth is no longer black and white. In fact, it’s not even shades of gray anymore. It’s a Venn diagram where you have to overlay multiple sources and build a sort of Franken-truth to get at the real crux of it all. And, of course, you have to find sources that are credible, regularly reliable, and utilize authoritative sources.
Of course, few care to do that, which is how opinionmakers have become newsmakers. It’s how you get to people like Glenn Beck and Alex Jones being treated as journalists when even they admit that they are entertainers. ESPN used to do journalism. Now it’s just Stephen A. Smith farting out of his mouth for hours on end.
Maybe that’s why I’m mad…why I’m in a state of grief over this thing that I believed so deeply in. Entropy came to truth and now the truthtellers have given up because Republicans buy sneakers too.
The Earth can’t be round, because to say so would advocate a position that might put down the flat earthers. You might lose Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supporters. TOO PARTISAN!
Climate change? Can’t report on that anymore. Talk about partisan. Oof.
Covid-19 was a hoax because some people on one side said so. Very partisan.
What a fucking mess. I need a cookie.
(Editor’s Note: Judging by a reread of this piece, I’m still in the anger and denial phase of my grief.)
Final thoughts on finality…
Bernie: I hate columnists! Why do I have all these columnists? I got political columnists, guest columnists... celebrity columnists - The only thing I don't have is a dead columnist. That's the kind I could really use.
Henry: Right. Listen...
Bernie: We reek of opinions. What every columnist at this paper needs to do is to shut the fuck up.
― Robert Duvall (Bernie) and Michael Keaton (Henry), The Paper
Dirt Nap is the Substack newsletter about death, grief and dying that is written and edited by Jared Paventi. It’s published every Friday morning. Dirt Nap is free and we simply ask that you subscribe and/or share with others.
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It’s still fucking cool at the age of 46 to see the words “By Jared Paventi” in print.
Look, I’m part of the problem. I have and do write on a freelance basis and, when I do so, I don’t work for free.
Mike and I worked together at that corporate marketing job 25(ish) years ago.
Rachel Maddow doesn’t align with my political beliefs, but I find her to be extraordinarily intelligent and insightful. I don’t agree with everything she says and, frankly, her panel last night was a little much, but it was better than CNN and whatever bobbleheads appeared on Fox News.
My job keeps me watching local television news frequently. And, I watched a lot of BBC World on July 4 to see the Parliamentary election returns. That, my friends, was fascinating.
Jared, so much good stuff in this article. Too much to elaborate here, so I’ll just compliment and thank you for provoking my thoughts.
Trump broke the proverbial back of trust in news. Of course CNN and FOX slant towards their viewership base. Somebody asked me once what I read for news. I said anything and everything. BBC, FOX, C-SPAN, the Village Voice, Facebook…err…strike that from the record.
But championing the allure of “fake news” has given followers the opportunity to grab their pitchforks and torches. It’s not fake news. It’s just news you don’t like.
Will we ever recover?